Guns and the mentally ill

Why the NRA keeps talking about mental illness, rather than guns

"WE DON'T go around shooting people, the sick people do. They need to be fixed." So said the gun-owning pensioner in the Korean War veteran's hat, demonstrating outside Connecticut's state capitol on March 11th. He was holding a sign reading: "Stop the Crazies—Step Up Enforcement of Current Laws", and like many of the gun-rights supporters rallying in Hartford this week, he wanted to talk about how improving mental health care was the proper response to massacres such as December's school shooting in Newtown, an hour's drive away.

Your reporter was in Hartford to report on the gun lobby, and its campaign to push back against state and federal gun-control plans proposed after Newtown's horrors, which saw 20 young children and six staff murdered. The politics of gun control will form the basis for this week's print column, but this posting is about something more specific: the gun lobby's focus on mental illness as the "true" cause of such massacres.

The message discipline of the National Rifle Association and congressional allies has been impressive. After an initial period of silence, the NRA came out with a consistent narrative about mass shootings. The problem, said such spokesmen as Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice-president, was that criminals and the dangerously ill can get their hands on guns.

At moments, the NRA and supporters almost sounded like liberal gun-control advocates. "We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed," Mr LaPierre told NBC television on December 23rd last year, days after the Newtown murders. The NRA backs the FBI-run instant background checks system used by gun dealers when selling firearms, Mr LaPierre noted. It supports putting all those adjudicated mentally incompetent into the system, and deplores the fact that many states are still putting only a small number of records into the system.

On the chill streets of Hartford this week, that same sentiment went down well with the Korean War veteran and his fellow demonstrators. All of which is perfectly sensible, yet puzzling. For the demonstrators, holding signs that read "Stand and Fight" and "Feels like Nazi Germany", made clear their deep distrust of government. Did they really support a large expansion of officialdom's right to declare someone mentally unfit, trumping their right to bear arms under the constitution's second amendment? In Hartford the question provoked some debate. But most demonstrators followed the NRA's line in opposing any talk of moving to "universal" background checks: jargon for closing the loophole that currently allows private individuals to buy and sell guns without any checks on the criminal or mental-health records of buyers. Almost 40% of gun sales currently fall through that loophole.

Mr LaPierre's line is both clear and not. He supports improving the quality of the federal database used for background checks, but opposes using that same database more often, calling any talk of universal background checks a ruse paving the way for the creation of the national gun register that the government craves, so it can confiscate America's guns.

He talks of improving mental-health treatment, but then uses the harshest possible language to describe the mentally ill, telling NBC:

We have no national database of these lunatics... We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that's got these monsters walking the streets.

So what is really going on? Interviewing the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, he accused the NRA of a "bait-and-switch", in which the gun lobby is trying to appear constructive without allowing any gun rules to change.

The argument quickly drifts into party politics. Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, casts the debate about post-Newtown gun controls as an either/or question, in which gun curbs and improved mental health are somehow antithetical. Responding to President Barack Obama's calls for ambitious gun controls in the wake of the school shootings, including a renewed ban on assault weapons, Mr Rubio said:

Nothing the president is proposing would have stopped the massacre at Sandy Hook... Rolling back responsible citizens’ rights is not the proper response to tragedies committed by criminals and the mentally ill.

On the Democratic side, the new junior senator for Connecticut, Chris Murphy, asserts that the general public are not buying such arguments, which he calls a "smokescreen". People understand that a mental-health system that can pick out mass murderers before they strike is a "policy illusion".

On balance, the talk of a gun lobby smokescreen is fair. Examine the NRA's arguments more closely, and Mr LaPierre demolishes his own suggestions even as he makes them. In a ferocious speech to supporters in Salt Lake City on February 23rd, he predicted that criminal records and the mentally incompetent would "never" be part of a background check system, which was really aimed at "one thing—registering your guns".

Instead, Mr LaPierre and allies paint a picture of an American dystopia, in which hand-wringing liberals, having closed down mental hospitals during the civil-rights era, refuse to put dangerous criminals behind bars:

They’re not serious about prosecuting violent criminals... They’re not serious about fixing the mental-health system. They’ve emptied the institutions and every police officer knows dangerous people out there on the streets right now. They shouldn’t be on the streets, they’ve stopped taking their medicine and yet they’re out there walking around...

The powerful elites aren’t talking about limiting their capacity for protection. They’ll have all the security they want... Our only means of security is the second amendment. When the glass breaks in the middle of the night, we have the right to defend ourselves

Such rhetoric has effects far beyond the world of gun rights. Both in Congress and in state legislatures around the country, politicians are debating proposals for increased supervision of the mentally ill, and mandatory reporting of those seen as posing a danger to themselves or others.

New York state has already passed a package of gun-control measures that includes a requirement for mental-health professionals—from psychiatrists to social workers and nurses—to report anyone deemed likely to seriously harm themselves or others. A report triggers a cross-check against a database of state gun licences and police may be authorised to find and remove that person's firearms.

Such intense attention to mental illness—for years the forgotten Cinderella of public-health policy—both pleases and alarms doctors and academics working in the field. Professor Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University has written a commentary for the Journal of the American Medical Association, examining the "promise and the peril of crisis-driven policy", and arguing that in a nation with constitutionally protected gun rights, the "real action in gun control is people control", or preventing dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun.

That carries risks, he writes:

The first is overidentification; the law could include too many people who are not at significant risk. The second is the chilling effect on help seeking; the law could drive people away from the treatment they need or inhibit their disclosures in therapy. The third is invasion of patient privacy; the law amounts to a breach of the confidential patient-physician relationship. Mental health professionals already have an established duty to take reasonable steps to protect identifiable persons when a patient threatens harm. However, clinicians can discharge that duty in several ways... For example, the clinician could decide to see the patient more frequently or prescribe a different medication. Voluntary hospitalization is also an option for many at-risk patients

Reached by telephone as he waited for a flight, Professor Swanson elaborated on a fourth risk, that of over-estimating the small proportion of violent crimes carried out by the mentally ill. What's more, he noted, the mental-health system is good at describing behaviour patterns but very poor at predicting specific acts by specific people. With hindsight, mass shooters are often described as obviously disturbed, he notes. "But you can't go around locking up all the socially awkward young men."

In one area—suicide by gun—mental illness plays a very strong role, Professor Swanson says, and closer supervision could do real good, despite the risks. In 2010 suicide accounted for 61% of gun-injury deaths in America.

Such statistics do not fit the narrative of the gun lobby, of course, with their insistence that a gun in the home makes citizens safer. Yet even here, where improved gun controls linked to mental health could do real good, it is vital to get the details right and avoid "knee-jerk" law-making, says Dr Harold Schwartz, chief psychiatrist and director of the Institute of Living, one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in America, founded in Hartford in 1822.

The post-Newtown national discussion about mental health is distinctly double-edged, says Dr Schwartz. It may increase access to some programmes. But the debate is also being used by those with other motives. Mental illness is ubiquitous, he notes, with rates of schizophrenia or bipolar disorders more or less the same around the world, with some rare exceptions. Yet rates of gun violence differ dramatically between America and comparable countries. And those differences tally closely with differences in the accessibility of weapons. To Dr Schwartz the diagnosis is straightforward: "the NRA is demonising mental illness to distract from the obvious, in-your-face relationship between the availability of guns and murder rates."

Opponents of gun controls may respond with familiar flurries of statistics. In Hartford, for instance, several pro-gun demonstrators cited the same talking point, claiming (falsely) that home invasion rates soared in Australia after that country banned the most powerful forms of guns in 1996, following a mass shooting. Actually, home break-in and robbery rates have fallen sharply in Australia since 1996, as have gun-death rates, with no corresponding rise in other forms of homicide.

America’s murder rate is four times higher than Britain’s and six times higher than Germany’s. Only an idiot, or an anti-American bigot prepared to maintain that Americans are four times more murderous than Britons, could possibly pretend that no connection exists between those figures and the fact that 300m guns are “out there” in the United States, more than one for every adult

Mr LaPierre of the NRA is a proud patriot. But when he talks of mentally ill "monsters" and "lunatics" walking the streets in such numbers that all prudent citizens must arm themselves to the teeth, he is slandering both them and his country, just as surely as any American-hating bigot.

The NRA's strategy works for me: define membership of the NRA as a manifestation of mental illness (which it surely is, at least where detachment from reality is concerned, not to mention being a "lunatic" and a "monster), prevent them from re-arming and continuing to threaten peace in America and their own children's lives, neuter their political strangle-hold on the American legislative system, and hey presto! The problem solves itself.
People like LaPierre are trolling the entire American nation. Using the mentally-ill (who as Dr Schwarz correctly notes are little to do with the problem, but all too easy to blame when things go pear-shaped as in Newtown) as a political scapegoat is reprehensible, and a sure sign that we should condemn these animals, and consign widespread gun ownership to history, where it belongs, among other anachronistic evils beloved of the "hallowed founding fathers", like slavery and misogyny.

Can I comment on one line from LaPierre: "They're not serious about prosecuting violent criminals." I think the truth is the opposite: the NRA and its largely GOP backers are making things easier for violent criminals and terrorists. How? We focus on specific gun issues and ignore the actual gun laws put in place. So for example, just yesterday, Senate Republicans are trying to make permanent various restrictions on law enforcement that help criminals.

To put this in context, my wife is a teacher. She has to report every single incident that happens in her class. If someone gets a scratch, that requires paperwork. A bus driver in a town nearby was fired yesterday because he forgot to check if the bus was truly empty. Paperwork. But the GOP has made sure that if a gun is lost or stolen by a dealer - by a dealer, mind you, not you or me - that doesn't need to be reported. In fact, though people can agree guns are dangerous in the wrong hands, the NRA and the GOP have made sure we can't even ask gun dealers to take inventory. We require every bit of prescription drugs & huge numbers of chemicals to be tracked but not guns.

The GOP yesterday tried to make permanent that a gun dealer, meaning someone with a license to deal, can never be required to renew that license because there have been no sales. Think about that. How do we track the bad guns? The GOP has made it illegal to have a gun registry. How do we know that guns are going to bad guys? The GOP has made it illegal - and wants to make that permanent - to ask a gun dealer to check if all his guns are there. That's a free path for any bad guy to "lose" guns.

I could go on for pages because there are so many restrictions of this kind made law. Again yesterday, the Senate GOP wants to make permanent that any data about guns “cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about fire-arms-related crimes.” That is a direct quote. Huh? So we can't even try to catch bad guys until they open fire on your family.

So if you want to know who is making your family less safe from violent criminals and terrorists, it is the NRA and the GOP.

Was not the gun used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook tragedy not actually owned his by all accounts mentally sound mother and not him?

Therefore, unless the NRA also advocates prohibiting anyone who happens to know someone who may be mentally ill from owning a gun also - which I doubt they do - this is all just a clear attempt to distract people away from the real issue of gun control.

The utterly insane arguments of the NRA puts rational, intelligent gun owners-- IE most of us-- in a bad light. I really wish they'd stop so that we can have a reasonable argument about gun rights and gun control, but there's too many vested interests and too much general stupidity for that.

You are quite right - guns don't kill people. During my last court hearing I also pleaded "not guilty" to the charge of rape. I was just drinking my 5th vodka when my penis suddenly decided to rape the barmaid. Why should I suffer??

In related news, a story came out this weekend in the NY Times, that gun ownership has dropped in the last 20 years from about 55% of households to about 35%, and is expected to continue to drop.
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As Americans becomes urbanized - and frankly, more educated - and hunt less, they realize that not owning a gun means you're much less likely to become a victim of one.

"America’s murder rate is four times higher than Britain’s and six times higher than Germany’s. Only an idiot...could possibly pretend that no connection exists between those figures and the fact that 300m guns are 'out there' in the United States..."
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I haven't yet looked at the comments section, but I'll bet you a nickle that the "idiots" are there now, claiming that very thing.

Sometimes an entire society can suffer from a "mental illness." For example, the Japanese are in utter denial about their actions in the 20th century and consequently can't understand why their neighbors are so suspicious of them. Americans are in utter denial about their small-arms fetish and consequently can't understand why the rest of the world looks upon a mad situation and says "this is mad." A distorted perception of reality is one of the classic signs of persistent mental illness and America isn't going to get well anytime soon because, as they say in the therapy business, "you have to want to change before change is possible" and few in the USA want to abandon their guns fantasy in favor of reality. The average American male has utterly unrealistic Rambo fantasies - no matter how obese or uneducated he might be, squeezing a pudgy finger through a trigger-guard provides compensation for feelings of inadequacy. That's a powerful delusion and not one that's easy to abandon.
So rational arguments (the USA has more violent deaths than any other OECD country, more children are killed by guns than anywhere outside African conflict zones, etc.) aren't going to help. Nor is the obvious fact that the "my gun keeps me safe from the government" fantasy is absurd - when was the last time small-arms were useful against an entity that can use stand-off weapons like Hellfire missiles fired from over the horizon, or even something as simple as an APC? No, Americans are stuck with gun violence because it's so deeply rooted in the national psyche as to be ineradicable.

I disagree on excluding murders from the comparison. It is a lot harder to kill someone without a gun than with one. Knife wounds are far more survivable than gunshot wounds.

Secondly a lot of murders are not purely attempts to kill the other person, they are attempts to injure them (murder applies even if the assailant only conspired to cause serious harm to the victim, but ended up killing them), unfortunately using a gun means the chances of killing the other person in the process is a lot higher. Britain and France and others have problems with gang violence in cities, but a lot of this maxes out at knife attacks and the homicide rate is a lot lower.

As a counter-example to your 1750s case, plenty of countries manage to overthrow their governments when there are gun laws. Tunisia, Libya, Thailand. Also, this is another straw man argument. The argument being made is that guns should be registered, and some types of gun banned, not taking everyones gun away from them.

I think you are new to TE's blogs. That was clearly a joke - I was pointing out the fallacy of the typical American argument that "guns don't kill people" - i.e., the gun cannot be independent of the owner just like my penis cannot act unilaterally!!! Or can it???

"Mr LaPierre of the NRA is a proud patriot. But when he talks of mentally ill "monsters" and "lunatics" walking the streets in such numbers that all prudent citizens must arm themselves to the teeth, he is slandering both them and his country, just as surely as any American-hating bigot."

Too generous of an assessment for the guy. LaPierre himself is the very monster that he wants rounded up - how can anyone think otherwise, given the things that spew from his mouth?

How can anyone take the NRA seriously when they insist that a national register of gun owners is a plot to name everyone who owns a gun and then take them away? With over 300 million guns in the United States, even a five year old can reason that taking away all of those guns is next to impossible. I cannot buy that argument whatsoever. Unfortunately, there are many people who are stuck in that paradigm and will buy into whatever fear is fed to them.

I believe it's all about business. The gun industry is paying off the NRA. (Obviously the current NRA doesn't represent its membership if most want background checks and the NRA is fighting it.) The NRA is spinning everything to create more access to guns. They used the bill of rights, the right to be armed for a militia, to convince the public that gun control is wrong. Based on some posts of gun owners online, I would sincerely worry if they were in a militia. They'er not emotionally or socially equipped to protect anything but a beer can. Obviously we don't need a militia with a military like ours. So then the NRA spins the threat of gun confiscation if sales are documented. They know what buttons to push on gun owners to fight gun control. Now gun owners are fighting that. The NRA is well practiced in PR for the gun industry. Law enforcement needs to track gun sales and purchases to find out where criminals are getting guns. That's critical to cut off the supply of guns to criminals. Once the supply of guns is diminished, there will be fewer guns on the street because of police gun confiscations from crimes and gun buybacks. The NRA doesn't care about this. I have to ask why? It's in the gun industry's interest to give honest gun owners a reason to buy guns. Crime sells guns. It's shameful.

Obviously the NRA doesn't have a clue about mental health in this country; I don't know why they think they can give advice about it. Diagnosing people for mental health issues isn't easy. Even if people with mental health issues are under medical care, it doesn't mean they'll follow it -- that is, take their meds, etc. You can't legislate that. You can legislate access to guns. Sadly, a lot of gun deaths aren't about clinical mental illness. People use guns to settle arguments or to be a part of a gang,. They're used in domestic violence and in suicides. If you take access to guns from people, they won't use it as a way to resolve their problems. If you make it hard for people to kill with lethal force, they are less likely to do it. That's something that the NRA cannot understand.